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0:00
Hello.
My name is Professor
Dimitrios Buhalis.
I'm a Professor at
Bournemouth University
Business School, and a
visiting professor of
the School of Hotel
and Tourism Management
at the Hong Kong
Polytechnic University.
I'm also the editor-in-chief
of Tourism Review,
the most established and the
oldest journal in tourism,
and the editor-in-chief
of the encyclopedia
of Tourism Management
and Marketing
that will be published
in August 2022.
I'll be talking to you today
about digital transformation,
smartness, and ambient tourism.
Looking at how
technology is going to
change everything we do
in tourism in the future.
0:39
Of course, the last
two years have been
a very difficult
situation due to COVID.
You can see from the United
Nations Waters Organization
that international
tourism arrivals in 2020
suffered a drop of 74%.
2021 was a better year
for tourism, but still,
we're very far away from
the activity that we had in
2019 where a lot of us
were able to travel freely
and enjoy tourism
around the world.
1:13
This had an immense impact
because a lot of companies,
a lot of organisations,
have changed.
You can see on this slide,
the Cairns' Tjapukai
Aboriginal Cultural Park,
which I was visiting
some years ago,
had to close as a
result of COVID.
1:32
You can see what the
predictions are from
the United Nations World
Tourism Organization.
But of course, nobody really
knows what's happening.
This gives us context
on where we are
and what is going to happen.
From the beginning
of the pandemic,
